2018 Olympic Blurb Day 13

The third and final weekend of the 2018 Winter Olympics is nigh, and my brain and heart are not ready.

My body, however, is pretty excited.

With two weeks of nonstop action, the body is bound to tire even when the brain is saying, "I love breaking down these routines and calculating scores!" and the heart is begging, "More Olympics - I love this stuff!"

It doesn't help that these Olympics (and the next two) are on the other side of the world, resulting in late nights or early mornings, depending on what you want to watch.

One of my students asked me yesterday, "So you just go home and watch the Olympics every day?" And I responded, "Yup!" But it did make me realize that not that many people suffer from Olympic fatigue because they watch far fewer events than me.

As I mentioned last night, I went to bed at a normal time last night and planned on watching my DVRed recording of the USA-Canada women's hockey gold medal match in the morning before work. I fully planned on doing that...until I woke up and went on the NBC Sports app to watch some other stuff while I got ready, only to have the entire plan fall apart when the front page of the app declared Team USA as the gold medalists and winner of the game.

See?

Well, so much for that. But it turns out that my DVR has been really messed up lately and doesn't let me fast-forward, so I guess it didn't matter too much anyway.

Am I still bummed that I didn't stay up to watch it? A little. But I was also wide awake and much more capable of teaching today than I might have been if I'd stayed up to watch the whole game.

Thankfully, I only have one more day of teaching during these Olympics, and then I can give myself a little more time to enjoy the Olympics and less time worrying about being work-awake!

Classroom Blurb
My kids did a technology assignment with Google Classroom and filled out some information about what they've learned during the Olympics. The kids love Chloe Kim and Shaun White and enjoy watching snowboard and bobsled. I did have some fun unique answers - one girl said her favorite athletes were Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Massot from German pairs figure skating, and another said Jessie Diggins!

The kids also were supposed to write about something non-Olympic related that we talked about in Social Studies the past two weeks. Some talked about maps and latitude and longitude, while others wrote about the North Korea/South Korea split and differences.

Two notes made me think a little bit. One child said something they learned was "Not everyone gets a medal." In a world where kids get participation trophies and medals when they play in a local sports league, it takes a bit to realize that doesn't apply when you become an adult.

The other note wasn't the first thing this child had written, but I encouraged him to come up with something a little different. What he came up with as his second choice was much more poignant: "It [the Olympics] brings peace by bringing people together to have fun."

Out of the mouths of babes, amirite?

Anyway, I printed out their writing, had them mount it on 5-ring-color paper (we don't limit ourselves to red, white, and blue in our classroom) and put them up in the hallway. I'm glad I got them up today so that people can read them tomorrow and Sunday (at church) while the Olympics are still happening!

Mini Blurbs

My eyes partook of these sports:

hockey

ski cross

Nordic combined

biathlon relay

curling

short track speed skating

figure skating

Compared to last night and tomorrow night, tonight seems to be a much quieter event list. I guess the organizers know better than to schedule too much against the women's figure skating free program.

Biathlon had to deal with some snow and windy temperatures for the first time all Olympics, and it made a real difference in the course. At the shooting range, instead of athletes going in and shooting as fast as they could, they would just set themselves up and stand there for ten or twenty seconds before beginning to fire. I'd never heard such a quiet shooting range before! No one was going fast.

South Korea suffered two wipeouts in short track speed skating tonight. The first was in the women's 1000m, when Shim Suk-Hee was trying to pass on the far side and ran into her teammate, Choi Min-Jeong, and took each other out of the race. And then in the men's 5000m relay the South Korean team tripped and fell and finished the race out of the medals! It sure was surprising to see a night of short track in South Korea when no South Koreans took gold.

The kids and I have watched quite a few events at school, and today they got to watch the end of overtime and the shootout of the gold medal hockey game. But while they watched the replay on the SMARTboard, I was watching the live feed of men's curling on my computer screen. Team USA finished off Canada in the semi-final, and I got to see it! (And I also got to check out Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson's absolutely sick stick routine to get the puck past the Canadian goalie in the shootout.

So how about the OAR curling athlete who got busted for doping? I remember watching Aleksandr Kreshelnitckii in the mixed curling last week, so I'm pretty surprised. He's not the first of these games - there have been two others. Japanese speed skater Kei Sato and Slovenian hockey player Ziga Jeglic also got busted and dismissed from the Olympics. At this point that's not a big number, but it's bound to change the further away we get from the Games, unfortunately.

Remember a couple of days ago when I wrote about the perfect race in Nordic combined? Well, put those Germans together on a team and they destroy the competition, which they promptly did today in the team Nordic combined event, winning it by one minute!

One of the Swedish ski cross athletes let them put a camera on her helmet during the competition so we could see what she is seeing on the course! If we could have more accessibility like this and the bobsled camera, I am all for it. It was very, very cool.

Speaking of ski cross, I don't think I've mentioned that giant drop from the starting gate. I've never seen it so steep before! I wouldn't even leave the blocks!

Today might be a little lighter, but tomorrow brings bobsled, big air, parallel giant slalom snowboard, and the premiere of the alpine skiing team event which makes me so excited!

My name is Claire Nat! You can follow me on Twitter @CeePipes for lots of Olympic comments, or follow me on Facebook at facebook.com/blurbmusings. Check out my blog for other articles!Read about Day 14 HERE!

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